186 - Livid (Livide)

    A girl starts training as an at-home nurse.  One of the patients she meets is comatose, and supposedly has a treasure hidden in her home.  The girl returns with two guys to search for the treasure.
    I don’t know what to think.  It started well.  It developed pretty well.  Then things got weird during the last act.  There are a few things that don’t make much sense.  However, this does actually remain one of the more interesting variations on the vampire mythology that I’ve seen in modern times.
    There are a few genuinely creepy bits.  The mechanical movements of the daughter are the real highlight of the movie, and the steampunk-ish surgical scene is really neat.
    The problem is that I had to look up the wiki article to figure out what the ending was supposed to be.  I’m still not sure if I understand it.
    Some of the smaller details seem a little annoying in retrospect.  There was a bit where the girl is annoyed to find that her father is dating again after her mother’s death.  Then she sees what I assume is the ghost of her mother.  While this was enjoyable at the time, it’s easy to assume that this information will be relevant later.  Instead, it seems that it was only there to spice up the first half of the movie.
    There were a few things that I liked about the movie though.  The flashback sequences were done very well, and I felt like they benefited from being set during the daytime.  The decoration of the house was well-done (although I’ve felt like use of taxidermy is a little cliche).
    It does feel like to does something unique for the vampire sub-genre.  I don’t know what it is, but it somehow feels a little more fresh.

185 - The Blob

    A meteor lands in a small town, releasing a gelatinous blob, which destroys/absorbs everyone it comes into contact with.
    I’ve never seen the original.  I really should.  The remake is much easier to find.
    The story is really predictable.  There are cliches peppering the whole thing.  The government crew gets involved, and it’s revealed that the government is behind this biological weapon, etc.  It’s truly a product of the time period.  This isn’t a bad thing.  I found myself enjoying the dated aspects of it.  The clothes, the hairstyles, the general appearance of the production is very firmly 80’s.  The effects work is at this wonderful level, where they do a lot of compositing of elements, and it’s done very well.  It looks a lot like some of the effects work from Little Shop of Horrors.  The Blob effects are usually really good.  There are miniatures used throughout, some great building miniatures too.
    This dated quality makes the whole thing feel like a campy drive-in movie.  It’s fun.  It moves pretty quick.  The dialogue is a bit silly, but that’s to be expected.

    What surprised me the most about this movie was that I thought that the Blob was an effective horror creation.  There aren’t too many creatures that don’t have a motivation, but even the ones that do are less motivated than this.  The Thing is an obvious comparison, but that hides in an individual at a time.  There’s a good comparison to be had with Horror Express.  The Blob never gives any indication of a personality, and those that are absorbed cease to be.  The Blob is a threat, but not a conscious one.  It’s almost the same as any medical thriller.

184 - V/H/S: Viral

    Third in the found-footage anthology horror series.
    The first is Dante the Great.  An amateur magician finds an enchanted cloak and becomes a superstar magician.  The cloak seems to have a wide range of supernatural abilities, acting as a portal sometimes, then granting the wearer a variety of telekinetic abilities.  This segment is really very fun, but it’s far too short.  This is a premise that could have easily been extended to feature length, although it would have to be recast.  The lead has just the right amount of slime for the role, but the female lead has a few one-liners that sound terrible coming out of her.  This segment also would have done a lot better if it wasn’t framed as a found-footage story.
    Parallel Monsters deals with a man who - along with his parallel universe counterpart - builds a doorway to connect the universes.  The two of them swap universes to look around for fifteen minutes.  In that time, things start pretty normal, and the differences between the universes become more pronounced, creepy, and eventually deadly.  This was really good.  There seems to be a single obvious difference between the universes at first, but the degree that reality has split only becomes clear much later.
    Bonestorm comes next, (“Buy me BoneStorm or go to hell!”) which has a group of skater kids that go to Mexico to finish filming a skate video.  They wind up in an area that seems to be used for some kind of ritual to raise a creature.  I don’t care about skate culture, but there’s a ridiculous aspect to this story.  It goes crazy, and it keeps on going longer than you expect it to.  There isn’t much of a payoff for it, but it remains fairly fun.
    The framing story is called Vicious Circles, and it’s better than the other framing stories have been.  It’s confusing, and it plays as a collection of disjointed scenes.  There are still weird things that are never explained, but by the end, you feel like you understand roughly what’s happened.
    This movie hasn’t gotten a great reception, but I think it’s actually better than the second.  There aren’t many high points, but there also aren’t any really low points.  I usually feel like this is more important.  It’s a solid level of quality, which is rare for an anthology movie.

183 - The Blue Lagoon

    A pair of 7-year-olds grow up on a secluded island, and eventually fall in love.
    In Top Secret! there’s a fantastic parody of this movie, and for most of my life, this is all I knew of it.  Now that Netflix finally has it, I’ve watched it.
    It has a terrible reputation, and I understand why.  Because the kids are marooned when they’re so young, they never really develop beyond that.  They develop their sexuality, and their priorities shift, but they remain roughly as annoying as they ever were.  It’s difficult to treat this as anything other than a bad script or bad acting.  But it’s neither.  It’s accurate… but that doesn’t mean that it’s pleasant.
    There is some beautiful photography.  I think there might be a touch of stock footage used for some of the sea life shots.
    What is much more pleasant is how frankly sexuality is portrayed.  There’s plenty of nudity, none of it erotic.  The approach to this probably would be difficult to get away with now, but it’s kind of refreshing.  It brings a sense of realism to a movie that really needs it.
    The realism is weird.  The movie plays fast and loose with some basic ideas - like the stone fish that the girl steps on would have killed her.  There seem to be no problems with illness.  For some reason, their clothes stay freshly white most of the time.  They don’t get sunburned.  (Some tanning happens later in the movie)
    There’s something that I don’t like about the ending.  I don’t know exactly what it is.
    The last half hour of the movie is mostly taken up with family bliss, after they have a baby, they spend their time goofing off, teaching the baby things, and having a good time.
    Maybe that’s the problem.  There isn’t much focus on the difficulty.  When I read an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe as a kid, I remember there being a long time spent on establishing a routine, as well as methods of getting everything he needed to survive.  Here, the island just seems to provide everything without much work.
    It’s actually a good story, and well photographed, but it’s so annoying to listen to characters that never learned how to talk like adults.  I doubt I’d watch this again.

182 - Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort

    A guy inherits a resort in the middle of nowhere, and brings his friends out to look at the property.  The inheritor finds his long-lost extended family.
    I don’t know why I keep watching the Wrong Turn movies.  I don’t think I’ve ever found them interesting… or scary… or funny… or entertaining.
    This one is a step above the last one, which had the hillbillies attacking a town during Halloween (I think.  I have a hard time remembering them).  This is better, and weirder, because it feels like it was a different script that was adapted into the Wrong Turn universe.  It seems like it would be easy to make some alterations to the story, and completely eliminate the hillbillies from the story.  The result is that this plays like a Shining-influenced story, focused on the lead’s spooky relationship with the resort.  The inclusion of the hillbillies seems like an afterthought, incorporated into the story out of desperation.
    There’s one thing that has bothered me more about the Wrong Turn movies over time, and that’s the gore.  I’m all in favor of gore in certain contexts.  When the characters get ripped apart at the end of Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, that’s cathartic.  When minor characters are killed off in these movies, it feels gratuitous.  This shouldn’t bother me, but it does.
    The effects work is a bit cheap.  There are ridiculous bits, like a guy’s stomach exploding after being force-fed water.  What stood out as being terrible was horrible masks that the three hillbillies wear.  These masks have been bothering me for awhile now, but with this movie, there was a sequence in a well-lit room that showed exactly how bad these masks are.  You can see the real skin under the eye holes, and around the mouth.
    There’s a lot of sex in this movie, and none of it is anywhere near erotic.  Was I really expecting anything of this?
    Meh.  I’m sure I’ll forget about the movie in another hour or so.

181 - Masters of the Universe

    He-Man and other heroes from Eternia wind up on Earth, and need to get back to Eternia to retake Castle Greyskull from Skeletor and his forces.
    I think I was the target demographic when this movie came out.  I think I would have been 7 years old, depending on what time of year it was released.  I was really, really accepting of movies.  I think I liked every movie I saw.  And yet, I never saw this.  I know I had heard some disappointed grumbling, but that was about it.
    I liked a lot of the He-Man toys, but I never felt like there was a fantastic mythology behind them.  This movie actually establishes most of that mythology!  This movie could have been the start of something big!
    It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what went wrong with the movie, since it seems like there’s something wrong with nearly everything, but that isn’t entirely fair.  There are aspects to everything that are great, but then the movie gets bogged down by things that distract.
    The Eternia sets are pretty good.  They’re dated by modern standards, but for the time, they’re good.  They reflect a comic-book atmosphere well, and they’re engaging.  Then the movie abandons them for about 3/4 of the running time.
    Many of the characters are created for the movie, and few of the characters are actually He-Man characters.  This instills a sense of disappointment.  We kind of wish we could see Orko… instead we get a weird inventor character.  The henchmen villains we get ar Evil-Lyn and Beast Man… then we get three new henchmen, Saurod, Blade, and Karg.  Who cares about these?  I would love to get to see Mer-Man, Trap Jaw… Tri-Klops… Clawful… just about any of them would be more interesting.
    Character design is the same.  Skeletor is the most entertaining design, and Man-At-Arms is pretty decent, but then Teela and Evil-Lyn seem kind of dull.  He-Man’s design is mostly accurate, but is surprisingly uninspiring.
    The story is weird.  It’s hard to feel like the plot aspects that take place on Earth are actually relevant.  The vast majority of the plot is dedicated to the heroes running away and being chased, so it’s a little hard to view them as heroes.
    I kept thinking that this movie could have been really good… with enough of a budget, and with less interference from production.  But that isn’t the only problem.  The script aims so firmly at kids without knowing what they want, that I can imagine kids watching it, and periodically getting bored, only to be excited by the few moments of inspiration that hit the screen.

180 - The Purge: Anarchy

    A year after the first movie, another Purge event happens.  Set in a city, a collection of unconnected people band together to get to safety across town.
    This is one of the oddest sequels I’ve seen, because it broadens the focus, but actually comes out presenting a clearer vision of the themes connected to the premise.  It’s better than the first movie, and the message is much better.
    More time is devoted to the government’s role in perpetuating the Purge, and not just in the big ways.  More than one person, prior to killing someone, announces that the government has granted them this right.  There is also a substantial plot that involves the government sending out trucks with armed soldiers with the purpose of wiping out the people in specific buildings.
    What’s more important is that we get a vision of the response to this sort of thing… eventually, people realize that this event just exists so that the poor can be wiped out en masse, and that the only way it’s going to be corrected is if the wealthy die instead.
    I still find the premise of this movie more disturbing than I would expect.  I’m not sure why that is.  I guess it might be the message that nearly everyone wants to kill others, but that the illegality of it holds them back.  I have a hard time stomaching that.